The Royal Bank of Scotland group has been hit by a technical fault that is affecting RBS and Natwest customers' online accounts and preventing balances from being updated.

Customers of the two companies are reporting that wages are not showing up in their accounts

The Royal Bank of Scotland group has been hit by a technical fault that is affecting RBS and Natwest customers' online accounts and preventing balances from being updated.

The issue came to light this morning, when a number of customers reported on the company's help pages that wages and tax credits had not been paid into their accounts. One small business owner told the BBC that the electronic system to pay staff was also not working.

RBS acknowledged the problem on its Twitter page at around 10am this morning, apologising to customers and claiming that it was working hard to resolve the technical issues

"We are currently experiencing technical issues which mean that a number of customer account balances have not yet been updated and some of our online services are temporarily unavailable," the company said in a statement.

"We are working hard to fix this and hope to have the problem resolved as soon as possible. We apologise for the inconvenience caused to our customers."

The issue has elicited a deluge of angry responses from customers on both Twitter and Natwest's 'Ideas Bank' page.

"After NOT being able to get my 2yr old to playgroup today (pre paid) NOT being able to take my driving test which cost £62 and NOT able to pay my mum back money I promised she would get Yesterday! and now iv got 22pence on electric meter! GREAT," wrote roxanne111 from Newcastle.

Others described the issue as a "disgrace" and called for the company to give an indication of when the issue would be resolved. Sarah-jbef from Norfolk was reportedly told by a customer service representative that service should be restored "by close of business," but had previously been given times of 10am and midday.

"My rent was due today. As far as I am aware it is sitting in my bank account not doing anything," said Daltone from Wirral. "The Indian woman at the call centre said it had definitely gone out, but reading comments here I am not so sure that is the case."

The latest tweet from the RBS Twitter account suggests that the issue will be resolved "within the next few hours".

RBS and NatWest are both part of the Royal Bank of Scotland group, and share a number of technical systems, including online infrastructure, according to Sky News.

Comments

Maccyroo - 14:48 29-06-2012

I worked for a company many years ago that banked with Nat West and one month they paid all the staff salaries twice! The bank noticed the mistake within 48hrs and notified our company that the staff would obviously have to repay the bank. Apparently, it was the bank, and not our payroll guys who were entirely at fault, and they could not automatically reclaim this money from the individual accounts of our staff. We were told by our Managing Director that we would have to authorize the repayments to Nat West from our own accounts immediately. We all complied, of course, but I was the only member of staff that had the forethought to send a personal letter to Nat West along with my cheque for partial repayment of the erroneous credit, explaining that i had deducted an amount of £50 to account for my "admin charges" for rectifying their error.

Three days later I was called in to our MD's office and he told me the bank had contacted him after receiving my letter and that they were "not amused".I was expecting him to say that as I was a senior manager that he was disappointed with my actions. Instead he poured me a drink, shook my hand and said that I may be one of the few people ever to beat the banks at their own "admin charges" game.